Wednesday, September 27, 2017

7 iOS 11 Features for the iPad Classroom

iOS 11 has dropped and with it comes some amazing new features that will surely benefit you and your students in the iPad classroom. Dig in to this blog post for a free downloadable and printable poster of 7 of my favorite new iOS 11 features. I've also shared some ideas and sample use cases as well as quick video tutorials for each new feature!

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Want to share these amazing new iOS 11 features with your colleagues and students? Download, save, share and print the poster!

The standard Camera app in iOS now has its own built in QR code scanner and its very simple to use! Just point your iPad camera at a QR code and it will automatically scan it and provide you with a notification to access it's content.

Of course there are lots of free QR code scanner apps in the App Store but most (if not all of them) typically have advertisements. This also means one less app needs to be installed on student iPads.

The standard Notes app on the iPad also now includes a useful feature! It has it's own built in document scanner option. You can add scanned documents to any Note and also use Markup to annotate over them. Annotations are then saved to the document inside the Note.
Although this new feature is being hyped as an easy way to sign documents, this can also be a very handy tool for students in the classroom. Worksheets, templates, and physical documents can easily be scanned by a student with their iPad and then they can digitally annotate to complete their work. The scanned document can also be sent to other apps and shared with the teacher or their peers.

This is my second favorite new feature in iOS 11! I've already used this several times since updating, and in fact most of the videos in this blog post were recorded with the new Screen Recording feature! iOS 11 now has the ability to record your iPad screen as well as audio.

This might now become one of the easiest ways to have students document their learning on the iPad. Students can use a variety of apps to describe, explain, question, analyze, annotate, and draw what they are learning or thinking and now they can screen and voice record as they do it! The video is automatically saved to the Photos app for easy sharing.

This is also a great option for teachers to record their class lessons. If you typically display and teach from your iPad, it's just one extra step to record your entire lesson along with audio. Then you can upload it to a video sharing service like YouTube or Google Drive and give absent students access to it (or your whole class!). A screen recording of your entire lesson would also connect nicely with something like EDpuzzle.com.

The Dock for iPad has also received a major face lift! It's now a floating Dock and no longer stuck to the bottom of our home screen. The new floating Dock now offers some great new features!

The new floating Dock allows you to store more apps. It's also now accessible from any screen on the iPad, even when you are inside another app. With just a quick swipe up from the bottom, you can access the new Dock. Along the right side it gives you access to 2-3 of your most recently used apps. And it improves multitasking across your Apple devices by showing you what Apple apps you are using on your MacBook or iMac.

Because of the changes to the Dock, the way to use Split Screen also changed. You can drag apps up from the Dock onto your screen to activate them in Split Screen mode. But there's more! There is also a new feature called Slide Over. Slide over allows you to pull in an app and have it hover on top of another app, while both apps are active at the same time. Split Screen and Slide Over can also be combined to allow you 3 apps on your screen at the same time (however, they are not all active at the same time).

You can drag & drop images, text, and links between apps while in Split Screen mode! No more having to save an image to Photos first, or copy/paste text. Tapping and holding on an image, highlighted text, or a link allows you to easily drag & drop it into another app!